Searching for Information In the Digital Age

Research methods and ways of communicating information has rapidly increased with the emerging social media technologies such as Twitter and Facebook. Along with the ability to communicate information by means of social technology, the data gathering phase of research has dramatic advanced with the ever evolving technological related developments in search engine tools. The recent collection of articles for this week reading assignment shedded some light on a few of the innovative data mining techniques and software development within this new digital era. For example in the article entitled “From Bable to Knowledge”, discusses ways to comb through massive digital collections. Using programs such as Application Programming Interfaces (API’s), researchers are empowered with the ability to find patterns in data by having the ability to “ query databases directly from server to server without using web interfaces”. The technology which undergird the operation of the myriad of API’s software such as Syllabus Finder allows teachers to investigate common ideals, concepts and references that can be used to develop their courses. As well as understanding data techniques to extract information from huge historical digital archives, researchers should understand the ways in which search engines search for topics and the rank order of keywords in search outputs. The article on Digital History Hacks (2005-08) covered the topic of exploring innovative ways in which digital historians are clearly getting information on individual search behavior by analyzing keyword listings with different types of concordance software. Knowing about the concordance process can assist one in developing better search strategies and key words and tags to draw people to your website.

 

Digital searching has increase historians ability to sift through enormous amounts of information. With an information overflow of data,  historians we still need to incorporate traditional historical methodology techniques to organize material and to present information in a meaningful yet scholarly way.

Notes

Daniel Cohen, From Babel to Knowledge: Data Mining Large Digital Collections, available at http://dlib.org/dlib/march06/cohen/03cohen.html. Acessed October 22, 2012.

Patrick Leary, Googling the Victorians, available at www.victorianresearch.org/googling.pdf. Accessed October 22, 2012.

William Turkel, Digial History Hacks: Methodology for the infinite archive, http://digitalhistoryhacks.blogspot.com/2006/10searching-for-history.html. Accessed October 22, 2012.